Ramblings from a Sysadmin

July 17, 2013

I caved – Dell Latitude E5530 Review

I was about to spend $500 to upgrade my existing D630, and then I found out that my $dayjob gives us $1K to buy our own laptop. I threw my hands in the year and decided I would buy a new laptop.

Lots of back and forwards on whether I would go back to a Mac or buy the best Intel based laptop I could and run Linux on it. I am already pretty happy with my Dell and their enterprise range are usually well built. I did check out a few other makers, but they didn’t offer the same specifications.

Everything I have tested has worked first time or with a little bit of googling, which is good, I didn’t want to end up with something so bleeding edge hardware wise that running Linux was going to be difficult.

Quick overview:

16GB RAM

128GB SSD (I replaced this with my OCZ 256GB SSD)

Core i7-3540M @3.0GHz

15″ matte LED backlit LCD 1920×1080

Keep in mind I am still running Ubuntu precise, but with the raring kernel.

One of the things that screwed me up for a while had nothing to do with laptop, but the fact that Bigpond tie their SIMs to their devices, that was so frustrating. So I went and got a SIM from Vodafone… well, I tried. I eventually got it after nearly 3 weeks. Anyway once that was in and I had changed the way the kernel modules load, the WWAN adaptor worked flawlessly.